Jonathan Renshaw

“Yes, I'm sure [the princess] thinks daily of a delinquent midget apprentice growing up to claim her hand ahead of all the nobles and princes of the realm. What could any of them possibly give that you don't have, except titles, land, wealth and all that.”

“How could children have spotted what everyone else couldn’t?” “Because we haven’t killed off our imaginations,” Aedan mumbled behind a wrapping of arms and knees.”

“Without imagination, things were only as they appeared - and that was blindness. Things were more than they appeared, so much more. When he considered an oak tree, it was not just a tree. To someone small, like an ant, it was a whole landscape of rugged barky cliffs and big green leaf-plains that quaked when the sky was restless, a place of many strange creatures where fearsome winged beasts could pluck and devour someone in a blink.”

“I always hated...all sad songs. I thought they made happy people miserable. Now I think I understand them better. Bards write them because they can't hold them back. Sadness has got to flow out or it gets stuck and turns bitter.”

“A mystery is so much more exciting than a wrapped up answer...A mystery carries on but an answer just ends.”

“Uh, I really didn't mean to disturb you.''I sincerely hope that is untrue. If you arrived here with no objective capable of disturbing me then you arrived with no objective at all, and you will have succeeded in disturbing me without purpose.”

“You!' Skeet bellowed.When uttered with just the right tone, this is the universal name for any boy. Accordingly, all heads snapped towards the angry master.”

“I would rather be the person who steps in front of a whole gang to defend someone and gets beaten up for it than the person who watches from a safe hiding. There were times I hid, and I think the shame hurts more than the bruises would have.”

“If you care about people and you really love them, you should get angry at the things that put them in danger or hurt them.”

“First, the wind would rumble in the distance like an approaching river, then he would see grass bend, pressed by a great invisible hand. The dull rumble would rise in pitch to a swishing, lashing exultation, causing stalks to lie flat against the ground while the tougher branches of shrubs held themselves up and shrieked their defiance in the gusts. Then the first drops, cold and heavy, would plummet from the sky and burst on the ground.”

“The confession of ignorance is crucial to the pursuit of knowledge. Another way of putting it is that those who pretend to know never will – they lack the humility to learn.”

“Aedan had never felt embarrassed about his imagination. Without it there was no magic.”

“You would think,' Aedan said, 'that I'd feel good about this-I've grown while he, my old enemy, has shrunk. Yet all I feel is a terrible ache. I pity him, that he has been called by age to surrender his strength.”

“He could not afford to indulge misery, to live in the past and stumble through life facing backwards.”

“A mystery is so much more exciting than a wrapped up answer, wouldn’t you say? A mystery carries on but an answer just ends.”